I was driving to Lloydminster, which straddles the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, to attend a rural ministry conference. The conference’s official title was Rooted in Faith: Celebrating Rural Churches in Community. The conference’s aim was to reclaim and revitalize rural communities. Rolling into conferences you size up things and the people you’ll be rubbing shoulders with. We had the preliminaries the first night, the usual wine and cheese. And then the stories began to flow.
I got talking to an Anglican priest who told me how a little, feisty Anglican congregation was acting as Christ in their community. They moved out from behind the walls of their building and their church relationships to meet a variety of needs in the community. This small church was so busy doing the gospel that they couldn’t afford, and didn’t seem to need, full-time ordained leadership. They had an ordained someone working part-time. Apparently the structures of Anglicanism looked upon this congregation with a somewhat predatory view. Since they couldn’t afford or even want the full-time ordained minister, they were considered less than worthy. They could have been on some list somewhere that had them threatened with closure. My Anglican storyteller made it very clear she’d advocated for them. I’m not sure what “advocated” means but it sounded like a good thing. We closed the conversation hoping that the congregation would be left alone to do its work.
I was chewing on some cheese and digesting a number of conversations when I bumped into a fellow cheese lover. A teacher and pastor, Rev. Dr. Someone-or-other. Like many in rural areas, the Rev. Dr. had two jobs. She did some part-time work in a prairie city but her passion and pleasure came from her work with small rural congregations.
According to the Rev. Dr., the sacred cows of the theology and practice of the institutional church have to change! The prevailing thinking and practice of seminary-trained ministers is failing the needs of rural mission and ministry. “Raise up locals to do ministry and mission. Train them where they are at with fully adequate resources to do whatever God calls them to do. Set them free to do God’s work where they are.” I chuckled as I listened because word for word I heard echoes of the passion and perceptiveness of others working in rural ministry.
For some of the conference we sat at tables in the main meeting room. There we were fed in a number of ways. Across the table sat a fellow Presbyterian working within the United Church. We connected through stories. “Sadie” ministered for our denomination, eventually married a local guy, and has since gone onto other things. She told a story about herself.
In the far off days of appointed summer student mission fields, a particular place got a bad name. The student previous to Sadie had found the place intolerable. The next year Sadie was appointed there, and she went out with an open mind. It turned out that the accommodation came complete with an outhouse that rocked in the wind because its eaves were caught in the boughs of a tree. “The roof of the house leaked and the only running water in the place came when it rained.” It did have electricity, which was a shock to local visitors.
But the heart of the community was what she remembered. A community youth group that the Presbyterians oversaw took the town by storm. It ministered to the participants from all faith backgrounds and none. It took Christ to the town and rural area! The young people raised their own money and taught the Christian life to their elders and the community.
Farmers and others in rural areas share a clear picture of the presbytery. “Those city guys don’t get us farmers and town folk! Yeah, they don’t listen very well either. Never hear what we have to say! The only time they want to come out to the country churches are for either seeding or harvest when we have no time to spare. It is always further to drive from the city to here than here to the city.”
Funny, the city ministers and representative elders said the same sort of things about the country folk.
During the conference, there were a couple of times that the theme really got to me. One of those times was when the speaker talked about “place,” needing to teach the uninitiated newcomer. In my early experience, I found myself foolishly assuming that I knew best. After all, I thought, I am the one to teach, what do the locals have to teach me? Upon reflection I am beginning to ask, am I too arrogant to be taught?
And more than all this, as a pastor am I open to God and God’s peculiar people loving me? Or am I insulating myself from God and the locals?
“Hmm — isn’t that a caution,” as my prayerful Grandmother McNeil was want to have said!
